olmue

My grandma gave me this quilt the Christmas I turned four. I still use it! But I've noticed that some of the internal stitching is wearing away. So today I decided to resew some of it.

Well. I realize that "one does not simply walk in" and sew a quilt in a day. I think this is going to be a bit of a project. But it's nice doing it, since it makes me think of my grandma. Besides, she sewed this quilt in Idaho, and I am repairing it in Idaho, so it has sort of made a circle.

My grandma died when I was nine, and since I was born in New Jersey and lived there until shortly after my grandma died, I didn't get to see her very often. But we visited when we could, and she always sent "letters" to my sister and me--since we couldn't read for a long time, they usually were one-page drawings of life around the farm. She was a great artist/illustrator! She was also smart. She was born in 1902 but went to college--the same one I went to! She had a very fun time there, as well as learning a lot. She was very talented in art, music, academics, and sewing. Her mom was a professional seamstress, and Grandma often sewed us clothes and mailed them cross country, and they always fit. She played the violin her whole life, and performed at someone's funeral three weeks before she died. She had perfect pitch (something I don't have!). When she was 60, she decided it was time to learn the piano, so she did. You can see that she came from a family of book lovers: here is her father (my great-grandpa who died in church when he stood up to sing with the choir and keeled over dead in a heart attack--yes, I often think of him whenever I have to perform anything!) and her brother:

 

I love it that in the background you can see the bookshelves OVERFLOWING with books. Yes. It is in the DNA!

She had a piano and we didn't, and every time we went to visit, she didn't care if we banged around on it. I started learning to play on her piano. She was from Salt Lake and was a city girl, but she married a farmer from Idaho and moved to the wilds up here (which were VERY wild in 1920!) She put her foot down when they moved into a log cabin and she found a long black snake winding around the wedding gifts that were on the floor. My grandpa immediately built a real house after that!

Here she is when she was young: my cousin looks just like her:



And here she is with her book-loving family (she is the standing girl with the big bow):



It's funny how much we can be like relatives we've barely even been around, who may have even lived and died before we were born. We once met cousins in the Czech Republic who were so like my dad it was EERIE--even though they'd never met. I guess the things you do in your family get passed down a lot further than you realize. I'm glad for all the good things that got passed down to us!